William Gibson, qui sera invité aux prochaines Utopiales, a donné un long entretien à la New York Public Library. 

 

Il est en vidéo mais aussi en pdf. 

 

Extrait : 

Citation:

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You have said that William Burroughs had such a huge influence on you, was very important to you early on. I’m wondering if you can take us back to that moment when you—when you read him as an odd teenager. 

 

WILLIAM GIBSON: Well, I found—I was probably twelve or thirteen years old, and I went virtually every day to the three rotating wire paperback book racks in the small rural town in Virginia where I lived, to see if there were any new books. The library had burnt to the ground forty years earlier, and never been replaced, and so that was my library. And even though I knew that the books on the racks were only changed once a month, I would still go every day just in case something—something had arrived. So, you know, and I literally checked out everything. 

 

And I found a very cheaply assembled anthology of Beat writing, which I bought and took home and hid from my mother, because I could see that—from the content that she wouldn’t approve of it. And so I started reading the Beats out of this rather, like, badly assembled little anthology. And I really couldn’t make head nor tail of most of it. But then I hit their excerpts from Naked Lunch, which made no sense to me at all. (laughter) It was like reading messages from Mars. Except that I could—I could sense that it was in part built out of science fiction

 

Source : Merci Actualitté